Magento with Italian Temper

Magento spreads around the world thanks to Magento enthusiasts from different countries. Here’s the first interview with Davide Consonni from Advanced Logic ( Italy).

Advanced Logic is a Magento Associate company and Amasty’s partner offering Magento consultancy services at 360 degrees. During the last months they have been working a lot on replatforming projects and migrations to the newest Magento versions. In addition to these activities Advanced Logic also receives numerous requests for realization or renewal of sites with responsive themes.

— Hello Davide! My first question is what is the demand for Magento services in Italy?

Magento is very popular in Italy as well as in the rest of the world. The demand for solutions based on Magento is high, as many people are aware of the potential of the platform compared to other open source eCommerce solutions. Several well-known Italian fashion brands have already chosen Magento EE for their e-commerce strategy. From a general point of view of the e-commerce market, Italy is a country with a high potential where you can still perform a lot of work. The products labeled with “Made in Italy” are known worldwide for their quality and an increasing number of brands and retailers are discovering the opportunities of multi-channel e-commerce solutions.

As for the companies which have lower visibility and budgets, well, they use various marketplaces which host and sell articles from different vendors. This model is being developed in particular in the food sector.

— Okay, let’s speak about you then. When did you start working with Magento?

We started working with Magento in 2008, when the Platform version was the 1.3. We were lucky enough to start working soon with the Platform thanks to one of our fashion retailer clients who had chosen Magento as eCommerce system.

Magento appeared immediately as a system with enormous potential and possibilities, and once we tried it, we decided to adopt it as eCommerce platform for the development of our clients’ projects. Since then the Platform has evolved a lot to become, today, the eCommerce system for excellence that everyone knows.

— How did Magento change your approach to the development of eCommerce projects?

The people who work in Advanced Logic have been operating in the Web field for over 15 years. Until a few years ago, web projects were developed with proprietary platforms and each agency offered to its customers an own CMS and eCommmerce solutions based on platforms were developed and maintained internally. The costs of such project were generally excessive.Especially if you intended to build an e-commerce website with extended functionalities, such as those achievable today with Magento.The maintenance of the source code was also expensive and often not adequate. The evolution of the Open Source world and the advent of modern eCommerce platforms, such as Magento, have changed this scenario. Now the digital agencies can focus more on the real business needs of the clients, being able to take advantage of the latest generation of eCommerce platforms which already offer many out-of-the box features and a great flexibility.

— Do you use third party Magento solutions for your projects?

These 3rd party solutions are of fundamental importance because they enrich Magento projects. If they were developed from scratch…Well, it would result in a significant amount of time and money. We use modules from the most known vendors which ensure:

– Quality of the code

– Rich and complete documentation

– Live demos of their products

– Interoperability between their modules

– Continued support of its modules in line with the updated version of Magento

— What about Amasty’s extensions?

Amasty, as one of the leading modules vendors, continuously produces new useful extensions for the platform. We use:

– Custom Stock Status, which allows you to show the user not only information on a general availability or unavailability of an article, but also to display the actual level of stock of a product

– Color Swatches Pro, which enhances the usability of the site and the user’s shopping experience with the possibity to visually represent color variations of an item as image blocks manageable via back-end

About The Author

Dmitri Koteshov

Dmitry is your personal manager at all steps of becoming an Amasty partner. He likes communicating with people all over the world and discovering places he has never been to. After work he enjoys playing football. ‘All things must pass’ is the life credo Dmitry follows.